The ratification of the Kyoto Protocol by Russia may negatively affect its economic growth and endanger the long-term goal of increasing the gross domestic product, Nikolai Tonkov said to a RIA Novosti correspondent on Wednesday. A member of the bureau of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, he is in charge of ecological questions.
“The Kyoto Protocol is a very dubious document based on a series of scientific assumptions which even scientific circles do not always accept”, he said.
Mr Tonkov added that “all calculations regarding Russia’s revenues and losses, on which experts are speculating, largely differ and are based on suppositions. There are no trustworthy calculations. It looks like the ecological effect and economic benefits from the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol are only clear to countries of the European Union,” Tonkov said.
He recalled that, apart from the United States which has refused to ratify the protocol, some other countries like India and China, having formally backed the protocol, fail to assume specific obligations for limiting the emissions into the air because this limits their economic development.
(Russian Information Agency Novosti)
